The Present Hope for Morality in the Common Age

I hear so much talk these days about the moral bankruptcy of humanity as it exists on the earth today. Echoing in the halls of academia, written in the pages of the purveyors of current events and spoken from the grand tribunes of institutional religions I hear the same belief pronounced. Morality in people is failing.

It seems that we are shocked and surprised by this absence of moral purity. Is it so hard to understand that we are a morally depraved and ethically challenged species? Does it accost our righteous view of ourselves as highly evolved and supremely intellectual beings?

Morality in people is not failing. Morality as an inherent condition of human actuality is a myth. We are not of ourselves moral beings. In fact the opposite is true. Humans are decidedly amoral in their nature. We are indeed as God declared through Moses and Jesus later confirmed “a perverse generation and an unfaithful people.”

What is surprising to me is not an absence of morality in humanity. What I find amazing is that humanity largely conforms to a communal set of moral standards. There is an accepted and widely adhered to set of socio-ethical guidelines. It is a counterfeit set of standards but it is in place and practiced virtually world wide. For example it is wrong to kill someone. It is also viewed as wrong behavior to sexually molest a child. It is wrong to steal, though this is relative depending on your view of what constitutes theft.

What interests me about the existence of communally practiced moral standards is that it points to the existence of “a way” to establish such standards. There is “a way” that this basis for moral behavior came to be. We can argue all day about what the way that this happened was. We could maintain that it came about as a result of tradition or base instinct or that it is derived from divine interaction, or a thousand other ideas. The significance of “the way” is what intrigues me. If there is a way that it came to be then there is a way that it can be born again.

Herein lies hope.